For a few months now, information has been increasing about the “Just Become a God” MMO Skyforge, which is being developed by mail.ru. The Allods team, also behind Allods Online, is working with the software company Obsidian on a genre gem with arcade influences.
No beta has been announced yet, and interested fans are dependent on the nebulous hints from the developers. Anyone familiar with interviews with devs knows that they are skilled in making everything sound fantastic. There have now been three major Q&A sessions, and a direction is slowly crystallizing that one likely wants to take with Skyforge: they seem to be taking this god thing quite seriously.
Every player starts as an immortal being. The goal is to gather enough believers around oneself and perform miracles to ascend to become a major god. One has apparently gone missing. Aliens and deities from other planets feel the power vacuum in the fantastic meta-world where Skyforge takes place and send their minions to attack. These are the opponents.
It would be pretty silly for an aspiring god to be a level 2 wizard who has to bring a farmer five rat heads because the farmer wants to make a stew out of them. Overall, being a god is quite hard to reconcile with such an MMO. A god standing in a corner organizing his inventory? Not very credible.
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Therefore, all signs at Skyforge indicate a desire to replace classic MMO conventions with a mix of Zen flow and arcade slot game experience. Players will not have a fixed class but will slip into a specific class mode as needed. Armor would also be useless for immortals, so there are talismans and powerful weapons (after all, Zeus did not wear a breastplate but rather a flowing toga and wielded a thunderbolt, if one believes cable network movies that run at Christmas).
There are no levels; the more powerful one becomes, the more abilities one receives, and the more … um … powerful one gets.
Currently, 300 people are working on Skyforge, and the game will run on language-specific mega servers; the graphics one can see now are simply stunning. The game is intended to be as intuitive as possible so that players can truly immerse themselves in their role as aspiring gods. Time and space are meant to blur (like in the Matrix), players should be able to fly (like in the Matrix), and generally accomplish things that a regular MMO player wouldn’t even dare to dream of (like in the novel American Gods by Neil Gaiman – Ha! As if we would mention the Matrix three times in one sentence).
At the moment, the community hopes that the developers will soon release a roadmap indicating when to expect an alpha or beta.
My MMO thinks: The game is practically screaming, “Bring me out on the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.” Everywhere you look, there are references to an arcade game. Ultimately, depending on one’s perspective, the developer talk either sounds like the “new big thing” that will break all boundaries or like a second edition of DC Universe Online. That game also has many of the great features that the devs want to attribute to Skyforge, yet it seems to lack some depth in gameplay.
The screens look fantastic, and the team is saying all the right things. We are very excited about reports from the alpha or beta. An MMO that heads in the arcade direction and aims to fully realize that concept is definitely an interesting alternative to the more traditional MMOs of 2014 or the sandbox wave that will hit us in 2015.
